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May 9, 2013

Get Answers To Your Bing Searches With Influence From Klout

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online

Klout, the social startup that measures online influence, rolled out a new product on Wednesday that allows its top influencers to answer topic-related questions that users frequently search for on Bing.

Top influencers will be prompted by Klout to answer specific questions in 300 characters or less pertaining to the subject in which they are influential. Answers will be posted on Klout, and highlighted in Bing search results at the top of the page, along with a photo of the person answering the question.

Examples of such topics include “what´s the best veggie burrito in San Francisco” or “what´s the best digital SLR camera to buy,” the company said.

San Francisco-based Klout has been testing the product with a small group of users, and currently has answers to over 150,000 questions — a nearly 70 percent response rate from the influencers it has queried.

Klout Experts now put the company in direct competition with Quora, Yelp and others.

Fernandez said Klout wants to help users actually heighten their Internet profile by providing useful information to others, rather than just measuring their visibility.

“Think of a company like eBay. It works well because of its reputation layer,” Fernandez said. “We just built that layer first, and now for the first time we´re enabling a direct sense of consumer utility.”

Klout says its edge will be the implicit promise that providing good answers will increase a user´s Internet influence, and therefore their Klout score.

The preview of “Klout Experts” was rolled out to a limited group of users this week, but those interested in participating can add their name to the company´s waiting list.